Category Archives: war on patriotism

Last Friday night, Sept. 22, 2017, President Trump ignited a firestorm when he told a rally in Alabama:

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired. He’s fired.'”

Trump, of course, was referring to National Football League (NFL) players, beginning with San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick last season, who show their disrespect and non-allegiance to the United States by kneeling or sitting, instead of standing, during the National Anthem, ostensibly to protest the Left’s tired old trope — racism.

That the NFLas a corporate body tolerates its players’ disrespectful conduct is outrageous because its own rules clearly stipulate that players must stand at attention during the National Anthem.

“The NFL Football Operations ‘bible’ is the Game Operations Manual — nearly 200 pages of procedures and policy for regular season games alone….

The NFL takes infractions of Game Operations rules seriously — so much so that clubs risk fines as high as $500,000 for violations ‘affecting the competitive aspects of the game.’ Some violations, such as late arrival for kickoff, can result in yardage penalties, and failure to comply with a uniform policy can result in a player’s temporary removal from the game.

The league takes violations seriously because it takes its responsibilities seriously. Good governance is an essential component in producing a fair and entertaining game.”

Here are the NFL’s rules governing the National Anthem, found on pages A62-63 of the NFL Game Operations Manual (Time):

“The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem.

During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country.Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.”

Whereas blacks make up the majority of NFL players (67.3% in 2014), the majority of NFL fans/viewers are whites or Caucasians (77% in 2015).

Available evidence shows that the fans are boycotting the NFL.

Beginning in October 2016, reacting to Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the National Anthem, a Rasmussen survey found that as many as a third (32%) of U.S. adults said they were less likely to watch NFL game telecasts because of the Kaepernick-led player protests. Whites, especially, were twice as likely as minorities to say they were less likely to watch. (The Daily Wire)

The NFL’s TV ratings are down so far this seasonand if that news isn’t distressing enough for the biggest ratings driver on TV, the latest slump follows a 2016 season marked by unstable ratingsthat had pundits and analysts scratching their heads….

NBC‘s “Sunday Night Football” in the first two weeks of the regular season is down 7% in viewership compared to last year; ESPN‘s “Monday Night Football,” is down 5%; and the averages of Sunday afternoon games on Fox and CBS are down 11% and 19% respectively, according to Nielsen data.

The NFL blamed Hurricane Irma for the drop in ratings.

On Sept 25, three days after Trump’s urging that the NFL fire players who disrespect the flag, CNNMoney reports:

NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” game, the Washington Redskins’ lopsided 27-10 victory over the Oakland Raiders, nabbed an 11.6 overnight rating compared to a 12.9 rating for a match-up between the Chicago Bears and the Dallas Cowboys one year ago. That’s a drop of roughly 10%.

To come up with overnight ratings, Nielsen takes the percentage of households watching in 56 U.S. markets and comes up with an overnight average — so an 11.6, for instance, means that 11.6% of households in those 54 markets tuned into the game on NBC on Sunday night….

Fox took a bigger hit. Overnight ratings for its singleheader slate of games were down 16% compared to last year‘s week 3 numbers.

Only CBS’ overnight ratings increased compared to last year’s week 3 coverage, but only by a modest 4%.

Another sign of fans boycott is the drop in ticket prices.

SF Gate reports that resale tickets for the Rams-49ers game on Sept. 21, 2017 were being offered on StubHub for as low as $14, “cheaper than buying a pair of $7.50 pretzels through the Levi’s Stadium app and comparable to the price of a beer and a hot dog at the the three-year-old arena. According to the team’s seat licensing map, the cheapest original face value for any seat is $85.”

Ralph Garcia of TicketIQ says “The current get-in price of $17 is the Niners’ cheapest game this season” and that the 49ers’ average list price has declined 32% since 2014, according to their internal numbers.

To sign a petition to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on a national pledge to boycott the NFL, go here.

H/t FOTM’s bongiornoc

Update

A new poll on fox5sandiego.com found that 89% of people who took the poll are in favor of NFL owners firing players who refuse to stand for the National Anthem.

It’s a popular way to for students to show pride during sporting events and rallies, but school and district officials are now warning students that the chants could appear inappropriate and intolerant.

“I wasn’t angry, but I was definitely like, ‘Why can’t we chant USA?’” said senior Ryan Bernal, “To say USA, you know, we’re all the same. We’re all American. It doesn’t matter what your skin tone is or where you’re from.”

The chants are now causing chatter campus-wide after school staff brought up the topic to a leadership class.

At some schools across the country, the chants appeared to be used in derogatory ways toward opponents of different ethnicities. The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which oversees high school athletics, addressed the concerns with local districts.

“There’s a time and a place to yell that and cheer that,” said CIF Sac-Joaquin Section Commissioner Mike Garrison.

The school’s principal sent out an email to families Wednesday and relayed the same message to students over the school’s P.A. system, clarifying any confusion. She told students and parents that sometimes “We can communicate an unintended message.” She also said USA chanting is welcome, but it may be best to do it at what she says are appropriate times, like following the national anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance.

School officials worry the chants could come across as intolerant and offensive to some, but parents see it differently, as an expression of pride and acceptance.

Mother Natalie Woodbury said, “I want to chant USA because I want us to pull together and help, not because I want anybody to feel left out or not a part of our country. ”

District officials say they want to make clear that there is no ban on chanting USA.

I’m glad that they will still allow our students to cheer for our country,” said Mother Cody Santero.

It’s a chant Bernal says will continue to be about uniting, not dividing. “We’re all one. We all stand as one together,” she said.

The district says there has never been a complaint about USA chants at the school. Students say there’s likely to be a lot of chanting at an upcoming football game, where the theme is USA pride.

The death of Kate Steinle meant nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, to demorats in California.

I cannot express here, within our guidelines, how outraged I am with the so-called lawmakers of that state.

From Fox News: Lawmakers in California on Saturday passed “sanctuary state” legislation even as President Trump and his administration have vowed to crack down on jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration agents.

The bill approved early Saturday limits police cooperation with federal immigration authorities and is intended to bolster protections for illegal immigrants in the state.

But the acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday warned of “tragic consequences,” saying the policy “will make California communities less safe.”

“By passing this bill, California politicians have chosen to prioritize politics over public safety,” Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, said in a statement. “Disturbingly, the legislation serves to codify a dangerous policy that deliberately obstructs our country’s immigration laws and shelters serious criminal alien offenders.”

Homan said ICE wants to work with local law enforcement to prevent “dangerous criminal aliens” from being released back onto the streets.

The legislation will now be considered by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who announced his support after the top state Senate leader agreed to water down the bill and preserve authority for jail and prison officials to cooperate with immigration officers in many cases.

The bill that passed Saturday prohibits law enforcement officials from asking about a person’s immigration status or participating in immigration enforcement efforts. It also prohibits law enforcement officials from being deputized as immigration agents or arresting people on civil immigration warrants.

The legislation follows Trump’s vow to crack down on sanctuary cities. Such policies limit just how much local law enforcement officials cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

The debate about sanctuary cities intensified in July 2015 when Katie Steinle, 32, was killed as she strolled along the San Francisco waterfront with her father. Steinle was fatally shot by a illegal alien with a criminal record who had slipped into the U.S. multiple times illegally.

On Friday, a federal judge in Chicago has ruled Attorney General Jeff Sessions can’t withhold public grant money from so-called sanctuary cities for refusing to follow federal immigration policies.

The ruling means the Justice Department cannot deny grant money requests until Chicago’s lawsuit against the agency is concluded. Leinenweber wrote that Chicago has shown a “likelihood of success” in its arguments that Sessions overstepped his authority with the requirements.

The city of Chicago sued the Trump administration in August after it threatened to withhold funds from sanctuary cities, and refused to comply with the Justice Department’s demand that it allow immigration agents access to local jails and notify agents when someone in the U.S. is about to be released from custody.

At least seven cities and counties, including Seattle and San Francisco, have refused to cooperate with new federal rules regarding sanctuary cities.

Pete Hasson reports for The Daily Caller, Aug. 31, 2017, that the left-wing hate-group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is calling on “activists” to “take down” three of America’s largest Army bases because they are named after Confederate generals and therefore have “the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed” like what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia last month. The three bases are:

Fort Bragg in North Carolina, named after Confederate General Braxon Bragg.

Fort Benning in Georgia, named after Confederate States Army Brigadier General Henry L. Benning.

The SPLC has the three Army bases — as well as elementary and middle schools, local streets and even entire towns — on its listof 1,500 “Confederate monuments” and recommends their removal as the only option. The SPLC website states:

“More than 1,500 Confederate monuments stand in communities like Charlottesville with the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed. It’s time to take them down.”

The SPLC is urging leftists around the country to flood their local newspapers with letters to the editor urging the removal of the monuments.

Given the willingness of the Left to destroy so-called Confederate and other national monuments, the SPLC’s campaign against the army bases could serve as a dogwhistle for militants to resort to extreme measures against those bases.

The SPLC’s map of “Confederate monuments” resembles the group’s “hate map” that identifies conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups” and which inspired domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins II to shoot up the Family Research Center in 2012.

On his nationally-syndicated radio show on Friday, August 18, 2017, Rush Limbaughsounded the warning that America is on the verge of civil war:

“America is under attack from within. Our culture, our history, our founding are under the most direct assault I have seen in my life. And I’m sure it’s the same with you. We haven’t seen anything like this. You might even get away with saying that we are on the cusp of a second civil war. Some of you might say that we are already into it, that it has already begun. However you characterize it, though, we are under attack from within. And it’s being bought and paid for by people from outside America, in addition to inside.

I’m thinking of people like George Soros and any other number of international financiers whose objective it is to take the United States out and down as a superpower, to literally erase the United States as a powerful or super powerful nation.”

But a civil war waged by the Left is already upon us, with acts of domestic terrorism in acts and words.

(1) Antifa calls for physical violence against Trump supporters

An Antifa website, It’s Going Down, is calling for violence against all supporters of President Trump and capitalists. (If the website is taken down, here’s the archived link: http://archive.is/vtPZL)

(2) 40,000 Leftists disrupt Boston Free Speech Rally

Yesterday, 40,000 Leftists converged on Boston to “counter-demonstrate” against a peaceful rally for free speech. After police declared the official end of the rally, Antifa thugs assaulted whites and clashed with riot police.

(3) Blow up Mount rushmore

On August 17, 2017, Vice magazine openly calls for blowing up Mount Rushmore.

(4) Woman calls for burning down America’s suburbs

CNN describes Sherelle Smith, the sister of an armed black man shot dead by Milwaukee police on August 12 as “calling for peace” and edited out her calls for calls for rioters to burn down the suburbs (Washington Times). Smith yelled:

“Burnin’ down shit ain’t goin’ to help nuthin’! Y’all burnin’ down shit we need in our community. Take that shit to the suburbs! Burn that shit down!We need our shit. We need our weave. I don’t wear it, but we need it. We need our gas. We need our food…. Y’all want to hurt somebody, take that shit further out. Bring bring it here.”

The 2016 presidential election was unusual not just because Donald Trump is an unusual candidate who managed to win by seemingly breaking all the rules, the election also saw the rise of a new political movement – the Alt-Right.

Dissatisfaction with Traditional Right

The term “Alt-Right” is an abbreviation of “Alternative Right” – an expression allegedly coined in 2008 by Paul Gottfried, a Jewish emeritus professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, to refer to “conservatives who saw themselves as too extreme for the mainstream movement . . . whose adherents include a range of racists, from white separatists to neo-Nazis.”

The very word “alternative” implies that the Alt-Right is an alternative to the traditional Right (conservatives) — Americans who believe in a constrained or limited government, the importance of law and order, and time-tested traditions embodied in the institutions of family, church, school, government, the Constitution, and the free market. Those institutions instill discipline and motivation, as well as correct and constrain the individual’s vices.

The Alt-Right, however, see traditional Conservatives as being too passive, spineless, yielding and ineffective against the Left’s successful assault on American culture and institutions, and on Western civilization itself. Thus, the Alt-Right’s contemptuous label for traditional Conservatives as “Cuckservatives” – cuckolded, emasculated and impotent conservatives.

In contrast, the Alt-Right is assertive, even combative, if circumstances require it. That masculine assertiveness is best typified by an Alt-Rightist nicknamed “Based Stickman” – Kyle Chapman, 41, a self-identified patriot and “protector of freedom” who first appeared at a pro-Trump rally on March 4, 2017 at the Civic Center Park in Berkeley, CA, dressed in a homemade combat outfit comprised of helmet, gas mask, a wooden shield with an American flag sticker, and carrying a big stick (thus, “stick man”).

In the park, Chapman defended himself and other pro-Trumpers from physical attacks by radical Leftists who call themselves Antifa (anti-fascists).

Chapman is representative of a New or Alternative Right who will no longer be passive because they believe this may be America’s last opportunity to reverse the tide of the Left’s Cultural Marxism that has taken over education (from kindergarten through college), entertainment and pop culture, the media, and seemingly every social, economic, and political institution.

Another example of the New Right’s assertiveness took place on June 16, 2017, when Alt-Right activists disrupted the performance of a New York Public Theater’s “re-imagining” of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar play, in which a Donald Trump-lookalike Caesar was stabbed to death by conspirators.

Vocabulary

Speaking of Based Stickman, you may wonder what “based” means.

“Based” is one of the words coined by Alt-Rightists on Internet chat boards, such as the /pol/ (politically incorrect) sections of 4chan and 8chan. In other words, the Alt-Right have developed their own vocabulary, the meanings of which can’t be found in dictionaries, but can be surmised by how the words are used in context. Some examples:

based: a term of approval or praise, which means courageous or ballsy — the opposite of “cuck”.

cuck: a favorite term of insult, which means being cuckolded, neutered or emasculated.

cuckservative: a term of insult and abuse for spineless traditional conservatives.

muh: being underwhelmed; indifferent; the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

Ideology

Political ideology is comprised of attitudes, values, and beliefs. In the case of the Alt-Right, their attitude is one of combative assertiveness; their values are rooted in the Western civilization, which includes Christianity; and their beliefs are that America’s decline is due to the hollowing-out of the manufacturing economy by outsourcing, an open door to immigration (illegal and legal) and refugees, and the Left’s takeover and corruption of culture.

To reverse that decline, the Alt-Right champions American nationalism (against the forces of globalism) and populism (the forgotten middle class), which explains why the Alt-Right resonate to and find appealing Donald Trump’s call to an “America First” domestic and foreign policy.

Two strains of American nationalism have emerged among the Alt-Right: civic nationalism vs. racial nationalism:

Racial nationalists believe that America was founded by and is rooted in the “white” (non-Jewish) race, and that dilution of “white” America by immigration, race-mixing, and government policies like Affirmative Action and multiculturalism have led to national decline and the increasing vilification and marginalization of “white” people, especially of “white” men. The Alt-Right white nationalists want white segregation — a return to an America of the “white” race via the repatriation of all immigrants who had come to the U.S. since the 1960s when an open-door immigration policy began. It is not clear what the white nationalists propose to do with blacks, native Americans, and Jews, not to mention the many “white” Americans on the Left. The identification of race-mixing as one of America’s banes accounts for a strain of chauvinism in racial Alt-Rightists, who propose a return to men as heads of household, and (white) women as docile wives, mothers and homemakers. An example of an Alt-Right racial nationalist is a writer-blogger-video game designer named Vox Day (real name Theodore Beale), 48, who claims to have a genius-level IQ. Many of the regular commenters on Day’s blog, Vox Populi, are similarly inclined. Some are almost slavish, calling Day their “Dark Lord”. Oddly for an American nationalist, Vox Day lives with his wife and children in northern Italy.

Civic nationalists are those who believe that the American nation is not defined by race, but by important shared political values embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Some examples of Alt-Right civic nationalists are “Based Stickman” Kyle Chapman and Mike Cernovich, a writer and self-promoting media “personality”. Not coincidentally, both Chapman and Cernovich are married to non-whites. That earned Chapman a derisive and dismissive comment from a racial Alt-Right nationalist named Eli Mosley: “There is no hope for this man or his rice-children.” Mosley’s comment received 50 up-votes on a Disqus chat-forum trashing Based Stickman.

While there really is a War on White Men, espousing a white racial American nationalism (as some Alt-Rightists do) neither makes sense nor is practical:

It’s nonsensical because many on the Left are non-Jewish whites, e.g., Bill Clinton, while there are patriotic non-whites among the Right, such as this Vietnamese immigrant who loves America. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it best: What matters is the content of one’s character, beliefs and behaviors — which are matters of our choice and volition — instead of the color of one’s skin, which we are born with and about which we can do nothing.

That’s also why a white racial American nationalism is impractical, because you alienate and marginalize Americans who can be your supporters and allies in common cause.

Another impracticability is how the word “white” is defined, and how “whiteness” is determined. How much “whiteness” makes one a “white”? Ironically, Vox Day, the champion of white nationalism, is of English, Irish, Mexican and Native American descent. Is Vox Day “white” enough?

Already amorphous and unorganized, with neither formal membership nor a common leader, the division among the Alt-Right between racial and civic nationalists throws the future of this new political movement into question. Where the Alt-Right goes, beyond the 2016 election that elevated their candidate Donald Trump to the White House, remains to be seen. Should Trump succeed in revitalizing the U.S. economy, the Alt-Right will probably subside and fade. But if President Trump were removed, by impeachment or assassination, then the anger that gave rise to the Alt-Right will likely burst into open violence.